Gears of War: Ultimate Edition PC Performance Review

Introduction 

If you have been reading anything about PC gaming over the past year you will have probably heard of the new DirectX 12 API, offering enhanced efficiency, several new features and improved performance when compared to the aging DirectX 11 API. While not all news regarding DirectX 12 has been positive, with the new API requiring users to upgrade to Windows 10, it is widely regarded as a huge step forward by both game developers and hardware manufacturers alike. 

Right now there are very few games that use this new graphical API, but now a game has been release that not only uses this new API but uses it exclusively, the first ever game that was developed from the start with DirectX 12 in mind. 

We knew Gears of War: Ultimate Edition would be coming to PC ever since last year’s E3, where it was announced at the first ever E3 PC Gaming Show. Since then we had heard very little word about the games PC version, so little in fact that the game released completely unannounced on the Windows 10 Store just two days ago. 

Now the first ever DirectX 12 exclusive game is here, let’s see how well it performs. 

 

 

Drivers 

For this game we will be using the newest drivers that were available when the game released, which is Nvidia’s Game Ready Geforce 362.00 driver and AMD’s 16.2.1 driver, both of which became available to the public in the past week.  

 

Test Setup  

We will be testing this game on our dedicated GPU test rig using the current flagship GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia. Both GPUs will be the reference design and will be ran at stock settings. 

 

AMD R9 Fury X & Nvidia GTX 980Ti
Intel Core i7 6700K @ 4.7GHz
ASUS Maximus VIII Hero
G.Skill Ripjaws 4x4GB DDR4 3200MHz
Corsair HX1200i
Corsair H110i GT
Windows 10 x64 

         

Nvidia GTX 980Ti (Left), AMD R9 Fury X (Right)

 

To represent AMD and Nvidia’s Mid range GPU offerings we have decided to use the AMD R9 380 and the Nvidia GTX 960. Both of these GPUs will be the ASUS Strix models

Both of these GPUs offer very similar performance in most scenarios and come in at very similar pricepoints, so it will be very interesting to see which GPU will come out on top. 

 

            

Nvidia GTX 960(Left), AMD R9 380(Right)